Two of the last three World Series champions have been linked to a major sign stealing scandal that has erupted within Major League Baseball, and CC Sabathia can’t help but feel personally impacted by the acts.
Sabathia’s New York Yankees lost to the Houston Astros in the 2017 ALCS and the Boston Red Sox in the ALDS the following year. We already know the Astros are guilty of using electronic equipment in an elaborate sign stealing scheme back in 2017, and MLB is investigating the Red Sox for similar violations during their 2018 championship season. In an appearance on Showtime’s “Inside the NFL” Tuesday night, Sabathia said he feels “cheated” now that the allegations have been confirmed.
“As everything’s been coming out and the more facts that we get, it’s getting frustrating, man, to sit here and know that late in my career I could’ve had a title, maybe ’17 or maybe ’18,” Sabathia said, as transcribed by ESPN. “But we got cheated out of a team kind of doing something that’s not within the rules of the game.”
The Yankees lost to the Astros in seven games, and Sabathia started Game 7. All four of the losses in the series came at Minute Maid Park, which is where Houston had set up a video monitor outside its dugout to help steal signals from opponents via a center field camera feed. Sabathia said the fact that the series was so close makes the cheating harder for him to swallow.
“When I first heard it, I was upset, and then as investigations went on … I was like, well, we can’t go back and play the games,” he said. “But as more information started to come out, I’m like, we played a seven-game series in 2017, ALCS, and we lost really on kind of like one pitch.”
Like many others, Sabathia feels even the $5 million fine, loss of draft picks, and season-long suspensions of former Astros manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow were not enough. He wants Houston to vacate its 2017 World Series title. Considering who MLB painted as the mastermind behind the cheating with the Astros, Sabathia may soon feel the same way about the Red Sox.
